🚀 go-pugleaf

Jim Segrave <jes@nl.demon.net> wrote:

> The ultimate reference:

> D. E. Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming. I think it's in volume
> 3 - Sorting and Searching, but it might be in SemiNuerical Algorithms
> (vol. 1 as I recall).

Cheers.

> The DOS version was memory limited and the tradeoff was to search the
> file if both hashes of the message ID were in the table, otherwise it
> was guaranteed it was a new article. 

Yep, though the history file searching isn't much of a problem iff
the Message-IDs come back from the server in the same order
as they exist in the history file. Which in most circumstances
they will be; the main exceptions being crossposted articles and
message-id HASH collisions.

There'll be some speed problems if the user rearranges the order
of the newsgroups in the timestamp file as well.

One time when it will potentially be a real performance problem
though is using multiple ISPs.

-- 
<URL:http://www.pierrot.co.uk/>                                  Team AMIGA
Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds.  Biochemistry is the 
study of carbon compounds that crawl.  - Mike Adams